Katherine Howlett Hayes

Occulting the past. Conceptualizing forgetting in the history and archaeology of Sylvester Manor

In this paper I argue that we should attend to why and how forgetting happens in concert with the construction of social memory, history, identity and heritage. Through a focus on processes of forgetting, this discussion offers a new set of interpretations of early colonial Sylvester Manor, a 17th-century plantation site in coastal New York. More specifically, the construction of racial categories over several centuries implicates social memory and forgetting, and introduces issues to the manner in which we remember the site where people of European, African and Native American ancestry met. This analysis views memory and forgetting not only as historical vectors in racialization, but also as factors in current identity politics.

The carceral side of freedom

ABSTRACT When nationalistic narratives implore citizens to recall progressive values in their history, as some American politicians have in the recent past, do we also remember the cost, and those at whose expense those values are gained? The historic site of Fort Snelling in Minnesota (USA) has been reconstructed and interpreted as a frontier fort, opening the west to settlers. Yet the site also has witnessed the failed promises to Native peoples, the ambivalent status of enslaved African Americans in non-slavery territories, and the struggles to belong by Japanese American soldiers whose rights as citizens had been abrogated. In this article I outline the challenges in remembering and acknowledging difficult aspects of history at this public heritage site which are often grounded in structures of whiteness. But I also consider the potentials for recognition, and perhaps healing and coalition-building, by shifting focus to the landscape and materiality of a carceral state.